LoRa Based Framework for Smart Greenhouse Monitoring Systems

Abstract

Agriculture being the largest profession in India depends on various factors like temperature, humidity, soil moisture, and others. LoRa is a long-range, low-power wireless platform framework developed for smart greenhouse monitoring to gain accurate values for dependent factors like temperature, humidity, soil moisture. LoRa is based on chirp spread spectrum modulation, which has low power characteristics like FSK modulation but can be used for long-range communications. LoRa can be used to connect sensors, gateways, machines, devices, animals, people, etc. wirelessly to the cloud. The purpose involves eliminating the traditional methods of the agriculture system and enhancing the crop yield and quality. Automated tools utilization is also being implemented, thereby improving the agricultural conditions, and reducing the human intervention.

Introduction

I. INTRODUCTION

Greenhouse technology may be a a part of agriculture, providing promising environmental situations to the plants. to shield plants from harmful atmospheric condition like wind, cold, extreme temperature, and disease, assembling a greenhouse will protect the plants by providing suitable environmental conditions. Greenhouses have their own place within the agriculture sector and the awareness to stay the sustainability of the greenhouse is vital. Crop production could be a challenging business, with the crops being constantly exposed to unfavorable climate. Weather and climate conditions play a crucial role in determining the pace of crop production. However, during times when global food security strongly depends on crop production, there's no place for any limitations. Therefore, the search for solutions resulted in farm management practices that involve farming during a controlled environment. Greenhouse Farming is one of the basic variations of farming in a controlled environment.

II. LITERATURE SURVEY

This is the survey carried on various journal or reference papers to undertake the existing system to explore the drawbacks in the existing technology for the Greenhouse Monitoring system using Lo-Ra.  George Princess T and Poovammal E explored that integrating IOT in greenhouse farming helps in monitoring the pesticides and storage facilities, tracking the required products of farm and also prevents the farmers from illegal logging. It becomes more effective by reducing the cost of production, connecting the greenhouses, stabling and monitoring the livestock. They gave a comprehensive analysis on smart agriculture and greenhouse farming using the current trends of IoT. It discusses the several distinct types of sensors for monitoring the consumption of power, energy and water. It also aims in assisting the researchers and helps farmers to accumulate the knowledge of the innovative IOT technology in the smart greenhouse cultivation.

KHH Priyadarshana et. al. identified that with the degradation of the environment due to soil erosion and the mass developments and the mechanical revolutions, the agriculture becomes a challenge with unfavorable environmental conditions.

Rakia Rayhana et. al. suggested that the evolving Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, which encompass the smart sensors, devices, network topologies, big data analytics, and intelligent decision is believed to be the solution in addressing the key challenges facing the greenhouse farming, such as greenhouse local climate control, crop growth monitoring, crop harvesting and etc.,

Mohamed M. Abbassy and Waleed M. Ead  explored that in Egypt, Agriculture assumes a huge role within the improvement in food protection. Moreover, there is a faster progression in the innovation of monitoring the agricultural conditions to increase the quality of production in the field. Various cultivating conditions like light, soil moisture, temperature, humidity, and so forth are viewed and restricted via checking and controlling devices. Heri Andrianto et. al. studied that food availability is a very important problem to be resolved due to the growing world population. The problem faced is how to increase agricultural production and how to reduce the use of pesticides so that they are not harmful to humans.

One solution to overcome this problem is to create a smart greenhouse system. Farming in this smart greenhouse system does not use pesticides. This study aims to develop smart greenhouses for hydroponic farming based on the Internet of Thing (IoT). In this study, they also measured the chlorophyll content of mustard leaves grown hydroponically in a greenhouse system to determine the nitrogen status of the mustard plant. The controller unit of this system is the Arduino Mega2560. Data on temperature, humidity, TDS, PH, light, and actuator conditions (pumps, lights, fans, sprayers, and valves) are stored on the real-time database firebase. Environmental conditions in the greenhouse can be monitored via an application on a smartphone and all actuators can be controlled via an application on a smartphone.

T C Jermin Jeaunita et. al.  proposed that Greenhouse deployment of farms gives hope for the farmers on higher crop yield, through lowering risks against pests, insects and adverse climatic conditions. Automation of greenhouse benefits the farmers in various ways by detection of soil and water quality and automatic irrigation. Involving scientific process in this automation boosts the benefits on agricultural activities. The current status of the greenhouse can be collected and sent to the cloud infrastructure for further decision making. This paper deals with the design and implementation of a model for IoT based agricultural greenhouse system for better crop yield. The system uses light-weight MQTT protocol for device-to-device communication.

III. METHODOLOGY

1. Soil Moisture Sensor: Soil moisture sensors measure the water content in the soil and can be used to estimate the amount of stored water in the soil horizon. Soil moisture sensors do not measure water in the soil directly. Instead, they measure changes in some other soil property that is related to water content in a predictable way.
2. Dht 11 Sensor: The DHT-11 Digital Temperature And Humidity Sensor is a basic, ultra low-cost digital temperature and humidity sensor. It uses a capacitive humidity sensor and a thermistor to measure the surrounding air and spits out a digital signal on the data pin.
3. LDR Sensor: An LDR is a component that has a (variable) resistance that changes with the light intensity that falls upon it. This allows them to be used in light sensing circuits. Light Dependent Resistors (LDR) are also called photoresistors.

Conclusion

The designed model is a scalable system to monitor and control greenhouse sensors, temperature, humidity, and moisture sensors of LoRa based framework for Smart greenhouse monitoring system. Based on the problems identified, the tentative objectives have been framed. We examined the methodology diagram and explored the advanced facility available in which we can control the climate to increase plant growth and avoid the effect of seasonal changes on the plants. The tools and technologies have been identified in order to implement the proposed system. The designed backend system can be easily integrated with other IoT applications, so, can the system contribute not only as a greenhouse’s monitoring and control system but also as an initial step for future smart city development. The proposed system offers the users to get easily choose the period that they want to check the sensors readings on ThingSpeak website and allows the users to self-retrieve past data, and additional sensor nodes and gateways to be integrated to extend the coverage.

References

[1] George Princess T and Poovammal E, \'Intelligent Greenhouse cultivation empowered in IoT ecosystem’, 2021 IEEE Asia-Pacific Conference on Geoscience, Electronics and Remote Sensing Technology (AGERS) June 2021 [2] KHH Priyadarshana, M.A.L.S.K. Manchanayaka and B.H. Sudantha, ‘IoT Based Greenhouse System for Tropical Countries’, 2020 International Conference on Image Processing and Robotics (ICIP), March 2020 [3] Rakiba Rayhana, Gaozhi Xiao and Zheng Liu,’ Internet of Things Empowered Smart Greenhouse Farming’, IEEE Journal of Radio Frequency Identification Volume: 4, pg:195-211 Issue: 3, Sept. 2020 [4] Mohamed M. Abbassy and Waleed M. Ead, ‘Intelligent Greenhouse Management System’, 2020 6th International Conference on Advanced Computing and Communication Systems (ICACCS) April 2020 [5] Lijun Liu and Wei Jiang, ‘Design of vegetable greenhouse monitoring system based on ZigBee and GPRS’, 2018 4th International Conference on Control, Automation and Robotics (ICCAR) June 2018 [6] Van Anh Vu, Dong Cong Trinh, Tuan Christian TRUVANT and Thanh Dang Bui, ‘Design of Automatic Irrigation System for Greenhouse based on Lo-Ra Technology’, 2018 International Conference on Advanced Technologies for Communications (ATC) Oct 2018 [7] Muhammad Faizan Siddiqui, Asim ur Rehman Khan, Neel Kanwal, Haider Mehdi, Aqib Noor and M. Asad Khan, ‘Automation and Monitoring of Greenhouse’, 2017 International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies (ICICT) Dec 2017 [8] Gianluca Burchi , Stefano Chessa Francesca Gambineri, Alexander Kocian, Daniele Massa, Paolo Milazzo, Luca Rimediotti and Alessandro Ruggeri, ‘Information technology controlled Greenhouse: A System Architecture’, 2018 IoT Vertical and Topical Summit on Agriculture - Tuscany (IOT Tuscany) June 2018

Copyright

Copyright © 2022 Shreya B B, Yamini Niharika P, Thota Vedasree, Yashaswini U S, Dr. Roopa G M, Prof. Vaishnavi Ajay Inamdar. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.